Dead Wrong

by Richard Phillips

  Once again Jack retrieved his kitbag and turned toward the distant Ford SUV, drawn to the danger that awaited him in that direction. It was an old, familiar tug that he didn’t try to resist.

  With his vision misting red in the fading daylight, Jack disappeared back into the rain forest.

  CHAPTER 20

  Dolf heard the sound of the helicopter engine winding up, from two hundred meters away. “What the hell?”

  The pair of gunshots that followed stopped him in his tracks, but the explosion and its accompanying fireball dropped him on his belly. It was an automatic reaction, one that was copied by all of those with him except for Tupac Inti and Janet Price.

  The latter dropped to one knee beside him. “I hope you have a backup plan.”

  Ignoring her, Dolf climbed back to his feet and motioned to his two men. “Back the way we came. Bring Inti.”

  Moving as quickly as he could manage, Dolf plowed through the undergrowth they’d just trampled over. As angry as it made him, he had to admit that Janet Mueller had been right about the man who had accompanied Inti. He was some sort of special-operations commando, a highly trained professional who reacted with lightning speed to changing battlefield conditions. It might be different in a city, but if they were going to survive this encounter out here in the woods, Dolf had to match that reaction speed.

  Shifting to the alternate radio frequency, he keyed the microphone.

  “Escobar, where are you?”

  There was a pause of several seconds before he heard the second pilot’s voice over the rush of helicopter noise.

  “Jesus. What the hell is going on down there? It looks like a war zone.”

  “Shut up and get back to your landing zone. We’re inbound in five minutes.”

  “Are you crazy? That’s where we were ambushed. I barely made it out. The others are all dead.”

  “Get your ass back there right now. We’ve got the gunman pinned down, and I’ve got Inti.”

  Hearing no immediate reply, Dolf felt the growl crawl from his throat.

  “Escobar.”

  “Yes?”

  “If I get there and you’re not waiting, you’ll wish you had died with the others.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Jack moved in rapid bursts, separated by brief interludes of listening silence. Whoever his opponent was, the man was making fewer mistakes. The group that had taken Tupac had heard the helicopter explosion and had immediately reversed course instead of coming for Jack. That meant they must be going for the Ford. That wouldn’t do them a whole lot of good. Jack had the keys, and bypassing the security system and hotwiring the vehicle would take too long. So where the hell were they going?

  The distant sound of an inbound helicopter answered Jack’s question.

  Damn it. He’d thought the fleeing pilot would exit the area after his narrow escape. The fact that he hadn’t meant the aviator feared going home as the lone survivor more than he feared hanging around. More than that, his sudden return meant that the leader on the ground had established radio contact.

  Jack increased his pace as he moved through the deepening darkness. Suddenly he paused. Up ahead, the jungle had acquired a different feel, a watchfulness so full of tension and fear that he could practically taste it. Removing the second of his three grenades from his bag, Jack tossed it twenty meters to his left.

  Immediately, two machine guns opened up, the flash of their muzzles clearly visible in the encroaching darkness. Avoiding revealing his own position by firing in the darkness, Jack pulled a knife from its ankle sheath and hurled it at the nearest shooter. The sound of a sharp blade burying itself in soft flesh was followed by a scream that trailed off in a wet gurgle.

  With a curse, the other man quit firing and scrambled away through the undergrowth. Jack ignored the retreating man. Moving up to the dead man, Jack retrieved his knife from his throat, wiped it on the man’s shirt, and returned the black blade to its sheath. He picked up the man’s weapon, an AR-15, ejected the spent magazine, and inserted a fresh one. Then he moved on, staying well to the right of the path taken by this fellow’s fleeing companion.

  Ahead he heard the sound of a helicopter swooping into a hot landing zone, the RPMs kept high enough so that the aircraft never placed its weight on its wheels as it hovered just above the ground.

  The yells of men climbing aboard spurred him forward, but as he reached the edge of the clearing, he could see the helicopter rise above the treeline and bank away. Seeing he had no shot that wouldn’t risk killing Tupac Inti along with the others, Jack’s frustration put a snarl on his lips. Then another sight shocked him to his core.

  Seated next to an albino as big as Tupac Inti, with a sniper rifle cradled in her lap, sat a blond Janet Price. As their eyes locked for a full three seconds, Jack didn’t raise his weapon . . . and neither did she.

  Then Janet, and the helicopter that carried her, disappeared beyond the trees, leaving Jack rooted to the ground, with a storm of conflicting emotions buffeting him. Amid all the questions that boiled through his brain, one bubbled to the top.

  What the hell was the NSA’s top operative doing here in Bolivia?

  CHAPTER 22

  Rocked by the intensity of the feelings flowing from Jack Gregory into its being, Anchanchu hungered for more. The hippocampus was Anchanchu’s playground, the place where short- and long-term memories converged with the human limbic system. In addition to Anchanchu’s connection to its host’s five senses, this limbic affinity provided the mind worm access to all of its host’s memories and emotions. To have existed for an eternity without experiencing any human sensations or emotions made this connection oh so sweet. And Jack Gregory fed the mind worm so strongly that the pleasure was almost unbearable.

  But Anchanchu had learned its limitations. Although it could interact with its host through dreams, attempting to communicate through conscious thought risked breaking a human mind, something that rendered its host worse than useless. That limitation had never before been a big problem, but Jack Gregory was different.

  With the most probable futures shifting and changing with every significant action the man took, Anchanchu found itself in a panic to establish some level of control, anything that might prevent Jack from accidently toppling the temple of humanity. The normal method of rewarding desired action with adrenaline didn’t work well with him. Sometimes Jack applied his iron will to resist that heady rush. Sometimes Jack went with his amped-up feelings so hard that his actions scrambled Anchanchu’s future-timeline projections.

  Even though the mind worm could invade Jack’s dreams, there again it faced frustrating limitations, only able to replay memories experienced through previous hosts instead of something that might guide this man to that which needed to be done. Humans thought their history had a tendency to repeat itself. And that was true, but only generally, not precisely. What was coming demanded precise action.

  The growing terror that filled the mind worm now had a face behind it. One previous host had brushed up against the very fate that once again issued its siren call. It was the only instance in which Anchanchu had been forcibly ejected from a living host. But if that happened this time, the odds of human survival were infinitesimal.

  And a stampeding Jack Gregory was carrying Anchanchu on a path that led directly toward that destiny.

  CHAPTER 23

  The start to this day didn’t leave Levi Elias with a good feeling. It wasn’t Friday, but it was February 13. An overnight earthquake, with a magnitude of 5.2 on the Richter scale, had forced the closure of the main NSA parking garage pending a structural integrity inspection. After passing through security at Fort Meade’s “NSA Employees Only” gate, Levi had spent fifteen minutes trying to find a parking spot close to the organization’s black-glass headquarters. He had finally given up, taking a parking spot at the far end of the huge lot. An unfortunate misstep as he exited his silver Acura had filled his right shoe with ice water. Now, with his overcoat collar turned up agai
nst the biting wind and sleet, he slogged a quarter of a mile through dirty slush before reaching the building entrance.

  Passing through security, Levi walked to the elevator and pressed the call button. He pressed the button for floor five and watched it illuminate, glad to see the door slide closed before anyone else got on. Right now, he just wanted to get to his office, hang up his overcoat, take off his wet shoe, and wring the water out of his sock into the trash can.

  When the elevator doors opened, he came face-to-face with Dr. Denise Jennings, her iron gray hair tied in a tight bun, a large android tablet in her left hand.

  “Levi. I was just at your office, looking for you.”

  Levi stepped out of the elevator. “Is it important?”

  “Yes.”

  Levi nodded. Of course it was.

  When Dr. Jennings finished briefing him, Levi called Admiral Riles. He waited a minute as the NSA director’s administrative assistant put him on hold, taking the opportunity to wring the muddy water from his sock.

  “What have you got for me, Levi?”

  “A Bolivia update. Have you got a few minutes for me and Dr. Jennings?”

  “I’ll make time. Come on up to my conference room.”

  Admiral Riles, already seated in his small conference room, waved them to their seats. It was a lack of formality the admiral had with his senior staff that Levi had grown used to.

  Dr. Jennings seated herself at the keyboard and routed the computer display to the screen that took up the majority of the far wall.

  “Sir, as you directed, we have targeted significant collection assets at Bolivia in recent days. Unfortunately, due to a limited high-tech infrastructure in much of the country, we have been unable to identify the location where Tupac Inti went to ground following his escape from Palmasola prison on Monday. However, we have breached the cell phone and computer data encryption used by Conrad Altmann’s neo-Nazi organizations, including the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista. From those intercepts, we know that Janet Price arrived at the Altmann estate around 1:00 A.M. on Tuesday.”

  Admiral Riles leaned back in his chair. “Did she run into any problems?”

  Levi took this question, trying not to let his concern creep into his voice. “We haven’t had any direct communications with her, but that was expected. There’s nothing else to indicate she ran into any trouble with her cover. From all indications, Ammon Gianakos came through for us. That brings us up to yesterday. Go on, Denise.”

  “Wednesday, just after 3:00 P.M. in Bolivia, we started picking up chatter on the UJC cell phones indicating that Tupac Inti had been spotted on Highway 9 in a black SUV, headed toward the Brazilian border. Later that evening, a major gun battle occurred near the Rio Mamore. We don’t have any video, but one of our satellites did capture this.”

  The image on the wall monitor changed to a satellite photo of a finger of jungle that jutted away from the snaking Rio Mamore. In a clearing just to the north of the tree line, a bright orange spot showed clearly. With a gesture, Dr. Jennings centered that spot and zoomed in. Clearly visible, the burning wreckage of a transport helicopter dominated the scene.

  Dr. Jennings continued. “Although police did not arrive on the scene until much later, they recovered eight bodies, including the pilot.”

  “Did they all die in the crash?” Riles asked.

  “No, sir. The bodies of six men were recovered from what appears to have been a second landing zone farther to the south, all dead from gunshot wounds. Another man died in the jungle from a knife wound to the throat. By the way, the burning helicopter didn’t crash. Someone shot the pilot in the face and chest, then tossed a grenade into the cockpit.”

  Riles clasped his hands beneath his chin. “Someone?”

  Dr. Jennings met his gaze. “Big John has assigned a 0.935 correlation to Jack Gregory.”

  Levi watched the admiral shake his head as he spoke.

  “I admit it looks like The Ripper’s work. What I don’t understand is how Big John can come up with that degree of correlation in a part of the world with so little electronic infrastructure.”

  Dr. Jennings shrugged. “I don’t know. The system is a worldwide neural net that correlates a massive quantity of node weights for seemingly unrelated data. You either believe or you don’t. Based on past history, I have to.”

  The admiral turned his gray eyes on Levi. “What do you think?”

  “There’s one thing Dr. Jennings didn’t mention yet. Our latest electronic intercepts confirm that the UJC captured Inti. Based on everything, I think that Jack Gregory got himself thrown into Palmasola under a fake name, that he killed a handful of neo-Nazis in a prison gang fight, and that he engineered Tupac Inti’s escape. Then, as Gregory tried to get Tupac out of Bolivia, I think the neo-Nazis paid a high price taking Inti away from him. Janet Price was probably right in the middle of the action.”

  Levi saw the admiral nod his head in satisfaction. “Good. The pieces are all in motion.”

  Admiral Riles rose to his feet, and Levi echoed the motion. As he watched the NSA director walk out of the room, Levi got the feeling that his boss knew something he wasn’t sharing with his top analyst.

  It was a feeling Levi didn’t like. Not one little bit.

  At six feet tall, Frederica Barnes, who everyone called Fred, had a soft Virginia drawl that matched her stunning face and figure. But she defended Riles’s prized privacy like an NFL linebacker, and he regarded her as the best administrative assistant with whom he had ever had the pleasure of working. Much to the disappointment of the men around her, she was gay and attached.

  Admiral Riles walked by her desk, issuing instructions as he passed.

  “Fred, unless it’s a national emergency, I don’t want to be interrupted.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Stepping into his spacious office, Admiral Riles walked to the floor-to-ceiling window that formed the wall behind his desk. With hands clasped behind his back, he looked out through the one-way, copper-infused glass that blocked all electronic transmissions from the massive building. It was probably the dismal weather that made the view of Fort Meade appear darker than normal, but it could also have been his mood.

  To be this close to culminating a plan that he’d put into motion three years ago, only to have The Ripper throw himself into the mix, was worrisome. Too bad the NSA’s recent attempt to recruit Jack had failed. Janet Price had come close, but for reasons only Jack Gregory knew, he had ultimately walked away. Now Jack was the admiral’s problem.

  Normally, he would bring Levi Elias in on this. But in this case, Riles had long ago made a decision to protect Levi from an operation that was based on an insane idea. Levi was the NSA’s top analyst, blessed with a brilliant and meticulous mind that spotted connections that others missed. Levi was the human equivalent of Big John.

  The thought brought a rueful smile to Admiral Riles’s face. It was crazy to equate a man to a computer. Then again, Big John wasn’t a computer, was it?

  The system was a sophisticated data-mining cyber-structure; hence the name Big John, after the legendary miner in the old Jimmy Dean ballad. The truth was that even Dr. Denise Jennings didn’t understand how Big John did what it did. No data center could hold the information that coursed through Big John’s synaptic system, a system that encompassed an estimated two-thirds of the earth’s computing power.

  The fact that Denise, who had designed the software that formed Big John’s core underpinning, didn’t understand how it worked wasn’t surprising. An outgrowth of the most advanced parallel computing research from Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, supplemented by work from MIT, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, and others, Big John was a collection of genetic algorithms operating on a vast, polymorphic neural net.

  It was fed by a software kernel Denise had developed in the latter part of the twentieth century under a secret government program designed to support and encourage the hacker subculture. With the rise of computer viruses, Troja
n horses, and worms, along with their endlessly evolving variants, everyone found themselves needing antivirus protection. Unknown even to the companies that arose to fill that need, Denise’s software kernel was incorporated into almost every one of the antivirus applications. And with each software update, her kernel got better.

  Big John operated on too much data to ever transmit across the Internet to a central data center, not even the massive NSA facility in Utah. It needed to touch everything. The elegance of Denise’s solution provided the answer. The antivirus software on each device scanned all of its local data and all data coming or going through its communications layers. And antivirus software needed to regularly update itself with the latest definitions. When it did that, Denise’s kernel updated itself and delivered its encrypted node weights using the same mechanism.

  Her kernel didn’t transmit raw data across the network. Each instance formed a synaptic patch of neurons, a tiny slice of a much larger brain, an insignificant piece of the vast neural net that was Big John.

  Computers, cell phones, and tablets came and went, were turned on and off, were replaced by newer ones, and Big John shifted and evolved with that changing capability. The information that each synaptic patch analyzed acquired shifting weight patterns in Big John’s correlative data web, a web so vast no data bank could store it. The world was Big John’s data bank.

  Admiral Riles turned away from the window, grabbed a clean cup from his shelf, placed it beneath the coffee nozzle, and pressed the “Mug” button. A minute later, seated at his desk, he sipped the delightfully stout brew, letting the flavor and aroma combine to spread a golden glow to his stomach as his mind reworked the current situation.

  Three years ago, Dr. Jennings had brought him the Big John data that had put the NSA on the trail of the Sun Staff and the unsolvable algorithm that crawled up its silver shaft and into the golden crown piece. That had started all this craziness and, like Klaus Barbie, Admiral Riles had recognized its importance. Unfortunately, the NSA had neither the crown piece nor the staff, and it needed both if it was to crack the code.